Sam Rosenberg’s monthly column CineMusic highlights newly released film scores, soundtracks, and the composers/curators behind them.
Only three months into the year, Project Hail Mary is already shaping up to be one of the biggest commercial hits of 2026. Helmed by the Jump Street and Lego Movie directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and adapted by The Martian screenwriter Drew Goddard from the best-selling Andy Weir novel, the film follows middle school science teacher Dr. Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), who’s stranded in outer space on a mission to reignite the sun before it dies out. To carry out this formidable task, Grace teams up with a stone-covered alien he aptly calls Rocky (voiced and puppeteered by James Ortiz) and through their journey together, the two form an unlikely bond. Although Project Hail Mary’s buddy-comedy conceit, old-school practical VFX, and earnest, crowd-pleasing throwback to big sci-fi spectacles didn’t quite affect or charm me as much as I had hoped, Oscar and Emmy-nominated composer Daniel Pemberton’s score mostly compensates for the film’s flaws.
Over the past decade, Pemberton has become an in-demand, prolific composer in Hollywood, having developed a wide-ranging body of work since starting out in the early 2010s. In addition to being among Aaron Sorkin’s frequent collaborators, the Londoner has mainly had a hand in soundtracking hyper-stylized animation (The Bad Guys and Spider-Verse films), based-on-a-true-story dramas (All The Money in the World, Ferrari), and A24-distributed features (Materialists, Eddington, and the upcoming The Drama).
On Project Hail Mary, the most expensive effort he’s contributed to yet, Pemberton takes cues from the operatic, grand swells of Interstellar and mixes them with a stylistic flair not typically associated with a sci-fi flick: distorted choirs, steel drums, woodblocks, clapping and stomping from local schoolchildren, and an instrument involving squeaky water taps that he invented just for this film. Over Zoom, I spoke with Pemberton more about creating that instrument, nearly incorporating harmonica into the score, and his process building Project Hail Mary’s multifaceted, percussive-driven texture from the ground up. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Paste Magazine: You’ve worked with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller a couple times before on the Spider-Verse movies. How did you get connected with them, especially to do this film, and how has your collaboration with them evolved since your first project together?
Daniel Pemberton: I’ve known Phil and Chris for ages. They were big fans of Steve Jobs, a movie I did quite a while ago now. We met in London and we just sort of became friends and hung out quite a bit and then I ended up doing the Spider-Verse movies with them. They’re very involved in those movies and I did The Afterparty series with them. [Project Hail Mary] was always floating in the background, so it was very exciting but also very daunting to take this on because I think we were all aware that we were flying a flag for original cinema and that we had been given the keys to a very ambitious and big film that was original and that we had to do a good job. Otherwise, no one else would get that chance again. Luckily, it seems like it’s worked.
This is your second sci-fi space-set adventure story you’ve scored following the Black Mirror episode “USS Callister: Into Infinity.” I’m curious to know what your approach was in trying to conceptualize the score for Project Hail Mary. Were you influenced by any other space movie scores, or was there a desire to try and differentiate your score here from other ones?
We really wanted to make [the score] not feel like things you’d heard before. If you think about all the huge film scores from the past like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris, and Interstellar—those are some of my favorites—this has a very different element to it where, at its core, it’s actually about two different entities learning about each other and becoming friends. It’s a lot more personal and certainly smaller than those movies, but there’s this huge canvas and landscape around it, which is the enormity of space and saving all of humanity. So it was fun to juggle between these two worlds. It was very challenging to come up with a score that had a coherence but that could play humor, friendship, and lightness and could also play awe, scale, and wonder.
Do you find it easier to score something that’s more genre-inflected or harder because there are certain expectations in place?
It depends. If you’ve got a film where you’ve got a very straightforward idea of what you’re gonna do, it makes it a lot easier. But I generally try and do things where I’m gonna try and do something different, so that makes it harder. With this one, we built the score from the ground up, so everything in this score is kind of created specifically for this film. I do some films like The Bad Guys, which is an animated movie with DreamWorks, and that is playing on the tropes of heist music and ‘70s action. I love doing those films, they’re really fun, but I’ve got a world to play in already. Whereas, with this one, we’re building everything from nothing. It’s an incredibly complicated, long process. Every sound you hear in this film is a result of months and months and months of experimentation and trying things out—things failing, things going in the bin—until you find that one sound that’s like, “Wow, that’s amazing.” There were huge amounts of vocal sessions with people to get unusual sounds and then, we’d find a couple that were really special and they ended up in the score.
Because Grace is a teacher, I thought it would be really cool to get a bunch of school kids [involved]. So we got a whole class of school kids and they provided a lot of the percussion, which was body percussion because I wanted as much of a human body in this score as possible, so there’s stomping and clapping and body slaps all through a lot of the film, particularly in the fishing scene. You can hear them a lot in there.
I understand you invented an instrument for the film that uses squeaky water taps. What was the impetus behind making that instrument, and where did you end up using it most in the score?
A friend of mine has a big, old house that had very squeaky, old pipes. I stayed there once and the bathroom had these very squeaky… I brushed my teeth, turned the tap on, and I was like, “Wow, that is a crazy noise. You know what, I’m gonna sample that.” So I recorded it on my iPhone. It’s just a really cool sound because it’s sort of a pure tone, but it has all these imperfections in it and things that are organic and you can’t really tell what they are and it turned out to be a really interesting instrument when you sample it. You hear that a lot through the score, that sound. You wouldn’t know what it is, but again, it’s just a very interesting, unusual organic sound.
It often sounds like an organ, so if you hear stuff that sounds like an organ, it’s not an organ. It’s a squeaky tap doubled with a Cristal Baschet, which is this crazy instrument made in the ‘50s, which is all glass rods that you play with water on your hands. It’s a weird, metal cylinder and there’s an amazing play of it by Thomas Bloch. I went to Paris to record him for a number of days. It’s got a very organic feel because you basically got water on glass going through metal. Again, that’s a thing of trying to make everything as organic as possible in the score, but also unusual so it doesn’t feel like, oh, I’m using an orchestra. I didn’t want you to visualize the score. I just wanted you to just feel it.
That kind of plays into Dr. Grace. He’s doing things practically and there’s also the practical visual effects used in the movie as well.
The journey was quite like Grace’s journey, in a way, where you’re trying to improvise your way through this thing you can’t really work out. The score was like an exploration, an adventure of trying to get somewhere without a map, just making it up as you go along.
When you’re recruited to score films, especially one like this, does your relationship with their themes shape the sound of the score at all, or do you mainly just work off of what the director is looking for? Or is it more of a case-by-case basis?
It’s a very collaborative experience, so we all have strong opinions on things. As Phil and Chris will tell you, I have very strong opinions and I will tell you they have very strong opinions, so we all push hard for what we think is best for the film. That is part of the great filmmaking process: you all work together to make the best thing you can possible and you’ve all got insights, some of which are great and some of which maybe aren’t. Part of that process is this journey through us trying to work out what it is because when you’re trying to make something new, again, it’s like exploring. You’re going to a place where no one’s been hopefully before and you haven’t gotten a map. If you’ve got a map, you just go, it’s that way. But if you haven’t gotten a map, it’s like, well, let’s go that way and then we can try that and we can try this. It takes a lot longer, but when you get there, it’s a lot more exciting because you’ve kind of turned up somewhere no one’s been before.
When you’re watching footage and the emotion isn’t coming through or you aren’t feeling connected to what you’re watching, do you feel pressure to try and overcompensate with the score, not necessarily with this project, but on other projects you’ve done? If so, how do you combat that dissonance?
Every film is different. There are bits where the music has to do a lot of heavy lifting and bits where you want to step back. With this film, we’ve got these amazing performances from Ryan [Gosling], Sandra [Hüller], and James Ortiz, who plays Rocky. You don’t want to step on those, but you also want to supplement them or help give them a different subtext or energy. There’s a lot of sequences where this could feel big or this could feel like people want to feel it a different way and that’s when music has to do a lot of work or when it has to take a step back because you don’t want to step on the toes of what’s there. I like both. I’ve done movies where the music has to do a lot of work. I don’t mind that. It’s fun sometimes. I’ve done movies that have been critically and commercially acclaimed and I’ve had movies that have had neither, but I’m still proud of the music I’ve done on those movies.
Maybe I’m incorrectly identifying the instrumentation, but there’s a moment in the film where you use almost a French-like bossa nova beat during the scene where Dr. Grace tries to figure out Rocky’s voice. What informed that choice?
That’s a dub track. One of my very, very, very early ideas for the film, before we even had a script or anything, was to try and make a dub score on steel drums and harmonica. Very quickly, I realized that was stupid. We went a different route, which hopefully was just as inventive. There’s steel drums on it. There’s dub beats on it. But there’s no harmonica.
Why dub specifically?
I just thought that’d be interesting. No one’s done a very good score with dub. That’s still in the back pocket one day. I’ll do a dub score at some point.
Are there any sci-fi or non-sci-fi film scores that you have affection for, or any film composers who have influenced you in some way?
Oh, yeah, tons. I’d say my all-time favorite composer is [Ennio] Morricone. Sci-fi scores, I really respect. I think Cliff Martinez’s score to Solaris is amazing and incredibly under-appreciated in the non-film composer world. I think every film composer, when that came out… it was a total groundbreaking score because everyone had to fucking rip it off. It became temped on everything. It was an amazing sound. I think Hans Zimmer’s Interstellar score is phenomenal and has levels of detail in there that are staggering. There’s so much interesting stuff in that score. 2001—there was obviously Alex North’s score, which was unceremoniously binned by Kubrick. His use of Ligeti and voices and stuff like that had a huge impact subconsciously on this film, I’m sure. Close Encounters, those feel like the films that are in this kind of world. Gravity by my friend Steve Price.
Sam Rosenberg is a filmmaker and freelance entertainment writer from Los Angeles with bylines in The Daily Beast, Consequence, AltPress and Metacritic. You can find him on X @samiamrosenberg.
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